Urban Exceptionalism in the American South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
The South ◽  
Urban South

While colonial New Englanders gathered around town commons, settlers in the Southern colonials sprawled out on farms and plantations. The distinctions had more to do with the varying objectives of these colonial settlements and the geography of deep-flowing rivers in the South than with any philosophical predilections. The Southern colonies did indeed sprout towns, but these were places of planters’ residences, planters’ enslaved Africans, and the plantation economy, an axis that would persist through the antebellum period. Still, the aspirations of urban Southerners differed little from their Northern counterparts in the decades before the Civil War. The institution of slavery and an economy emphasizing commercial agriculture hewed the countryside close to the urban South, not only in economics, but also in politics. The devastation of the Civil War rendered the ties between city and country in the South even tighter. The South participated in the industrial revolution primarily to the extent of processing crops. Factories were often located in small towns and did not typically contribute to urbanization. City boosters aggressively sought and subsidized industrial development, but a poorly educated labor force and the scarcity of capital restricted economic development. Southern cities were more successful in legalizing the South’s culture of white supremacy through legal segregation and the memorialization of the Confederacy. But the dislocations triggered by World War II and the billions of federal dollars poured into Southern urban infrastructure and industries generated hope among civic leaders for a postwar boom. The civil rights movement after 1950, with many of its most dramatic moments focused on the South’s cities, loosened the connection between Southern city and region as cities chose development rather than the stagnation that was certain to occur without a moderation of race relations. The predicted economic bonanza occurred. Young people left the rural areas and small towns of the South for the larger cities to find work in the postindustrial economy and, for the first time in over a century, the urban South received migrants in appreciable numbers from other parts of the country and the world. The lingering impact of spatial distinctions and historical differences (particularly those related to the Civil War) linger in Southern cities, but exceptionalism is a fading characteristic.

Agriculture and Rural Life in the South, 1900–1945

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Thomas Okie
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Crop Agriculture

The period from 1900 to 1945 was characterized by both surprising continuity and dramatic change in southern agriculture. Unlike the rest of the nation, which urbanized and industrialized at a rapid pace in the late nineteenth century, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and poor, from the 1880s through the 1930s. But by 1945, the region was beginning to urbanize and industrialize into a recognizably modern South, with a population concentrated in urban centers, industries taking hold, and agriculture following the larger-scale, mechanized trend common in other farming regions of the country. Three overlapping factors explain this long lag followed by rapid transformation. First, the cumulative effects of two centuries of land-extensive, staple crop agriculture and white supremacy had sapped the region of much of its fertility and limited its options for prosperity. Second, in response to this “problem South,” generations of reformers sought to modernize the South, along with other rural areas around the world. These piecemeal efforts became the foundation for the South’s dramatic transformation by federal policy known as the New Deal. Third, poor rural southerners, both black and white, left the countryside in increasing numbers. Coupled with the labor demands created by two major military conflicts, World War I and World War II, this movement aided and abetted the mechanization of agriculture and the depopulation of the rural South.

The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cody R. Melcher ◽  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The South ◽  
Us South ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
The American South ◽  
White Workers

The failure of labor unions to succeed in the American South, largely because national unions proved unable or unwilling to confront white supremacy head on, offers an important key to understanding post–World War II American politics, especially the rise of the civil rights movement. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the failure was not the result of a cultural aversion to collective action on the part of white workers in the South, as several histories have suggested, but rather stemmed from the refusal of the conservative leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize an otherwise militant southern workforce composed of both whites and Blacks. These lost opportunities, especially among southern woodworkers and textile workers, contrasts sharply with successful interracial union drives among southern coal miners and steelworkers, especially in Alabama. Counterfactual examples of potentially durable civil rights unionism illustrate how the labor movement could have affected the civil rights movement and transformed politics had the South been unionized.

Large-Scale Manufacturing in the South and West, 1850–1860

1971 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Bateman ◽  
James D. Foust ◽  
Thomas J. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Perfect Competition ◽  
The South

An examination of the manuscript censuses of manufacturing in 1850 and 1860 indicates the forthcoming revision of many traditional interpretations of American industrial development. This study suggests that large-scale manufacturing in the South and West was quite similar in the decade before the Civil War and that antebellum manufacturing was sufficiently concentrated to imply that the model of perfect competition is as inappropriate a description of mid-nineteenth century industrial structure as it is of twentieth century industry.

Paul Bunyan and the “Frozen Logger”

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
National Office

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Spatial Dimension of the Employment Market Exposition to Digitalisation—The Case of Austria

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1852
Author(s):  
Kinga Hat ◽  
Gernot Stoeglehner
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Industry Standard ◽  
New Business ◽  
Development Paths

Digitalisation, referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, is gradually becoming part of all areas of life. The progressing digitalisation inspires new business models, restructures production processes and provides new revenue and value-producing opportunities. Simultaneously jobs are becoming abdicable and livelihoods can get threatened. To analyse the spatial context of the susceptibility of regional labour markets to 4.0 technology in Austria, the occupation-based assessment of digitalisation probability was projected on the industry standard classification and linked to the statistical employee data at the municipal level. The outcomes reveal to what extent the economic sections and divisions are exposed to digitalisation. Results representing spatial distribution reveal that digitalisation risks cannot be explicitly assigned to certain spatial structures or localities. Still, it can be stated that urban areas and small towns are relatively less exposed to disappearing of existing jobs. Municipalities with the highest vulnerability to labour replaceability are located mainly in rural areas. The discussion focuses on regional resilience, social vulnerability and possible development paths for different frameworks and spatial context of consequences. The study emphasizes the importance of digitalisation processes for regional development and presents an approach of analysing their territorial dimensions.

The Nineteenth-Century South in Film

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Christopher Hulbert
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 19Th Century

Representations of the 19th-century South on film have been produced in America from the Silent Era to the present. These movies include some of the most critically acclaimed and influential in American cinematic history—Gone with the Wind (1939), Glory (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013)—and have produced some of the most iconic onscreen characters—Scarlett O’Hara, Josey Wales, Uncle Remus, Django Freeman—and onscreen moments—Rhett Butler not giving a damn, Mede boiling to death in a giant cauldron—in all of American popular culture. Depictions of the 19th-century South on film have also accounted for some of American film’s most notorious offerings—see the section entitled Anti-Slavery: Blaxploitation—and some of its biggest financial disappointments, such as Raintree County (1957) or Gods and Generals (2003). The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) set standards for how southerners and other Americans would imagine the 19th-century South and subsequent films have been responding ever since. Prior to the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s, Lost Cause themes dominated at the box office. After integration, the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, movies about the 19th-century South gradually shifted toward African American and female protagonists. Films also became increasingly graphic, violent, and sexualized in the late 1960s and 1970s as the pendulum swung fully away from the moonlight and magnolia, pro-slavery narratives of Gone with the Wind. In the 1990s, Hollywood began to carve out a middle position; however, neither extreme—exemplified by The Birth of a Nation and Mandingo, respectively—ever completely disappeared. Filmic coverage of the antebellum (1820–1860) and war years (1861–1865) dominates portrayals of the 19th-century South. These movies home in on major themes involving the legacy of slavery in America, the legacy of the Civil War, American territorial expansion, and American exceptionalism. Moreover, the South is habitually depicted as unique compared to the rest of the nation—for its hospitality, pace of living, race relations, mysteriousness, exoticism—and southerners are represented as innately more violent than their northern counterparts. Generally, the messaging of these films has been untethered from contemporary academic interpretations of the region, slavery, or the Civil War—yet their scripts and visuals have played, and continue to play, an outsized role in how Americans imagine the South and use the South to forge regional and national identities.

The Consumers’ Co-operative Union: Embedding Integrated Popular Front and War on Poverty Social Programs in the South

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Anne Gessler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Credit Union ◽  
Grocery Store ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
The South ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
The Cost

Chapter three analyzes radical Great Depression- and World War II-era consumer cooperatives in working-class Freret neighborhood as their anti-racist, socialist calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system careened into their constituents desire for economic expediency. Opening an integrated grocery store called Consumers’ Co-operative Union, along with host of affiliated cooperatives, German, black, and Latin American organizers muted their Popular Front sympathies to lower the cost of living for racially mixed Freret residents and implement New Deal economic reforms in the South. Although critics charged that Rochdale cooperatives were too apolitical, and while radicals’ principles were co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda, chapter three illuminates how the city’s mid-twentieth-century credit union movement embedded Popular Front ideals into Great Society social policies. Credit unions operated as political channel for marginalized communities, situating New Orleans urban growth within the context of the long civil rights movement.

Theology as Entertainment: Oral Debate in American Religion

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Brooks Holifield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The South ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Worship Service ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Alexander Campbell

In a 1959 survey of 2,706 ministers of the Churches of Christ, an American denomination that grew out of the nineteenth-century reform movement of Alexander Campbell, the rhetorician James Swinney discovered 215 preachers who said that they had conducted public oral debates as a way of attracting converts and defending their tradition. During the previous half-century, they had held around 4,400 debates, each lasting from one to fourteen days, mainly in the rural areas and small towns of the South and lower Midwest. Another student of Campbell's movement has compiled a list of more than 9,000 such debates, around 500 in the nineteenth century and more than 8,500 in the twentieth. The forensic superstars included regional celebrities like J. D. Tant of Texas, who held more than 350 such contests between 1885 and 1941 and who argued that four people would attend a debate for every one who attended a worship service. His assertion calls for qualification, but it reminds us of a practice that once attracted widespread attention and that has continued to flourish in parts of American Protestantism.

scholarly journals Urban Areas in the Transformation of the South: A Review of Modern History

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Population Growth ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Fort Worth ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Us

Since the 1940s, the southern US has been transformed from a region of backward agriculture, low-wage industries located in small towns and rural areas, and unrelenting racial segregation into a modern society and economy. In 1950, there were no metropolitan areas in the South with a population of one million or more, but 18 had populations in excess of one million in 2000. The populations of the Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Miami metropolitan areas grew to over 4 millions. Population growth in the 18 largest metropolitan areas accounts for 63% of the total population growth in the South from 1950 to 2000. The transformation of the South is, to a sizable extent, a transformation to an urbanized society. This paper documents this urbanization by examining population and employment growth in those 18 metropolitan areas.

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